How to disable automatic maintenance tasks in Windows 8

If you are running the Windows 8 operating system, and it does not really matter if you are still on Windows 8 or have upgraded to Windows 8.1, then you may have noticed that the system starts to run maintenance jobs all of a sudden.

While some of those tasks are defined to execute only when the system is idle and not in use, you may still notice that the tasks are run regardless of that.

So, if you are playing a multiplayer game, watching HD movies or running other tasks that require a lot of processing power and system resources, you may have noticed that things slow down during that time.

While that won't happen if you use a high-end machine, it may very well be an issue on low to mid-end systems.

Another thing to consider is that Windows will wake the computer to run the regular maintenance task on the system.

How scheduled maintenance works

Automatic Maintenance has been designed to address several issues of maintenance related tasks that users experienced on previous versions of Windows.

The goal of the feature is to combine all maintenance related tasks such as checking for Windows and software updates, running defrag or performing antivirus scans and including those by Windows and third-party developers to run them without impacting the performance or energy efficiency of the PC.

Windows schedules the automatic maintenance to run at 3AM or 2AM every day by default. The daily limit is set to 1 hour which means that it will run no longer than that per day.

It will also only run if the computer is idle, and stop maintenance tasks when the use returns and starts using the PC again.

Maintenance tasks are resumed when the PC is idle again with an important change. Tasks marked as critical will be run regardless of user action or load.

Disabling the maintenance tasks may resolve those issues for you. It is suggested to disable the tasks to see if this is indeed the case. If it is not and the issues that you are experiencing are caused by something else, then you may want to consider enabling the tasks again.

Tap on the Windows-key to bring up the start screen interface. If you are already on it, skip this step.

Type Task Scheduler and click on the schedule tasks result. This opens the Windows Task Scheduler.

Right-click on Regular Maintenance and select disable from the context menu. This turns this task off so that it won't be run anymore.You can perform the same operation on the Idle Maintenance task as well, even though that should not really be necessary.

Windows won't run the disabled tasks anymore. It is up to you to determine whether that is beneficial to the system's performance or not. If you use the system as usual, it should become obvious whether that is the case or not.

As a side effect, you may disable the wake feature that the maintenance triggers to run the task. If that is the issue that you are noticing, you can alternatively change the time the maintenance task is executed at.

It is possible to change both the time and the wake option using the Task. You do need to double-click the task in the Task Scheduler to do so.

Switch to Triggers and select edit. Here you can change the time the task is run on the PC.

After you have made the change and clicked ok, switch to Conditions.

Remove the checkmark from "Wake computer to run this task" to disable that feature as well.

Summary

Article Name

How to disable automatic maintenance tasks in Windows 8

Description

How to turn off or modify Windows 8's automatic maintenance tasks.

Author

Martin Brinkmann

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About Martin Brinkmann

Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand.You can follow Martin on Facebook, Twitter or Google+

none of this works, it will turn it off for a while, and then it will start again. Is there a reg hack that can get rid of it for once and for all, if I cannot find something , I am going back to windows 7

it would be useful if this actually worked. here i sit yet again with my maintenance setting set to 5am and then after that didn’t work i went in and disabled EVERYTHING with the word maintenance in it, and yet its 430pm and it just started running again while i’m in the middle of working. effectively locking my computer to a stand still other than some web browsing every 5 or 10 minutes apart

actually it didn’t work for me either and the maintenance turned back on automatically. the fix is to follow till step 3 in the above description, right click on the idle maintenance option and select properties. then click on the ‘triggers’ tab. there you can see the trigger time for that task. click on the time and below you will find the ‘edit’ button. click it. a new window opens up and in the bottom you can find a ticked option called ‘enabled’. untick it and press okay. repeat this for regular maintenance. this would permanently stop automatic maintenance.

This is a load of Bollocks, I got the schedule up, looks nothing like this and doesn’t have them options. Instead of wasting people’s time, why don’t you and 90% of other sites google picks, go and do something useful like close down your site.

About gHacks

Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.